Hello.

You have reached the web page of Niniane Wang. I live in Mountain View, California. I was previously an engineering manager at Google and Microsoft.

My blog.

Follow me on Twitter:

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Some products I enjoyed working on:

	Founded and led Lively.
	Tech lead for Gmail ads.
	Google Desktop Search. We laughed, we wept, we banged our heads against the table.
	(20% time) Movie Showtimes on google.com.
	Cloud rendering, which shipped with "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight". SIGGRAPH sketch, Journal of Graphics Tools paper, etc.
	Rendering rain and snow. SIGGRAPH sketch, Game Programming Gems article, etc.

My resume.

Some side projects I've enjoyed doing for fun:

• Open-source TF-IDF package: http://code.google.com/p/tfidf.
• Asian hotel reviews: http://hotelfoo.com.

A few photos.

My name "Niniane" is pronounced like "Ninian". It sounds like Vivian, substituting n's for v's. ... I chose the name in 1995. It comes from The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart. Before that, I went by my chinese name 王忻.

My brother Tom is a video game programmer for Blizzard in Irvine, California. Previously he was a programmer on Sims 3 at Electronic Arts. The "Frugal Sim" trait in is modeled after me and my mother. Tom is the best brother in the world!

While driving down to California, I suddenly figured out what the song "Hotel California" means to me.

A couple career-advice articles I wrote:

• How to Write a Killer Resume, for Software Engineers. (translated into: russian, hebrew).

• Preparing for a Software Engineering Interview (translated into: russian, spanish).

An entertaining piece I found on the differences between men and women.

In the year 2000, three Caltech friends and I embarked on a weekend road trip in eastern Washington state. We stopped at a little diner -- scrambled eggs, apple pie, your standard rural American diner.

On the wall hung a whiteboard with the daily specials. The bottom of the whiteboard was covered by a drawing of an orange crescent half-emerging from blue waves. Dan Egnor, programmer extraordinaire, said the crescent is the moon. I maintained that it was a shark.

"Why on earth would they draw a shark?" asked Dan. "In orange?"

"I'll bet you," I said.

We agreed on the terms: the loser would place the winner's name into their next shipping software. If Dan won, his name would have been hidden into Flight Simulator 2002. If I won, my name would be in Dan's next search engine creation.

We called over the waitress. "What is that on the bottom of the whiteboard?"

"It's the ocean."

"No, the thing coming out of the waves."

"Oh, a shark."

Dan went on to create Google Local Search, and in 2004, I became an Easter egg in Google Maps.

Update: In 2009, this Easter egg was removed.

If you enjoyed this, let me know.

I leave you with this Simpsons quote: